data recovery external drive

[cappaj1]

I have an external usb drive that all of a sudden on one bootup gives the message 'do you want to format this hard drive'. I disconnected immediately when I got the message.

It has a good deal of data, especially of video and photos, that I'd love to recover.

Is there any free software that anyone can recommend that might work? I believe all it lost was the partition.

Thanks.

[sswilson]

Is it a 3.5 drive in an enclosure? If so, first thing I'd try would be to remove the drive from the enclosure and hook it up to your system the old fashioned way. That way you'll bypass any of the enclosure interface in the off chance that it's toast.

[Mau5fan]

If it still comes up as unallocated within your PC then you could try using Active Undelete to recover your missing data.

[Arinoth]

I had a problem in the past where this happend, a friend of mine suggested booting into linux to see if i could access it, had it not been a funky linux format with the DNS-323 it would have worked